Another day, another Elsevier website illegally selling articles

Elsevier seem to have responded to my criticism yesterday and have stopped selling the article “HIV infection en route to endogenization: two cases” from their ScienceDirect website. Take what you will from that change, but I infer that they have realised that they are in the wrong.

Actually, they are still selling it from the ScienceDirect website too. It only looked freely available to me because I myself had paid for access to it & I guess a cookie remembered me. It’s still on sale at ScienceDirect.com as well as clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com

Further update: As of 2015-03-09 17.13 PM the articles were finally freely available ‘unchained'(?) from behind Elsevier’s paywalls.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so just to make sure they really were still illegally selling this article that shouldn’t be sold, I made another test purchase:

I heard back from Didier (the corresponding author) yesterday. He does not know why Elsevier are selling his article, nor did he give them permission to.

Elsevier (RELX Group) have been doing this for many years now: selling open access articles that authors/funders have paid-for to make freely available to everyone. Peter Murray-Rust, Mike Taylor and others have written about this extensively.

Related

Mike Taylor

“Elsevier seem to have responded to my criticism yesterday and have stopped selling the article “HIV infection en route to endogenization: two cases” from their ScienceDirect website. Take what you will from that change, but I infer that they have realised that they are in the wrong.”

Not for me: when I look at that ScienceDirect page, the article is still paywalled.

This is either an astonishing level of incompetence, or an astonishing level of mendacity. I really don’t think there’s a third option.

This title recently transferred from Wiley to Elsevier and there was some missing metadata for some of the OA articles. Thanks for flagging this up. We are taking steps to add the metadata to the articles today, and will of course reimburse you for your purchases. We will also investigate whether anyone else has purchased PPV access to the articles, and reimburse them as necessary.

Please note that there is one issue of possible misunderstanding in your blog post. There is a difference between the rights the publisher has in the article as a result of our license to publish, and the rights conveyed to end-users by the CC-BY-NC-ND license.

May I ask how, when and who from Elsevier obtained their ‘license to publish’ from the copyright holders (the authors of the work)?

I am in contact with the corresponding author and I don’t believe he/they gave Elsevier a ‘license to publish’. They did however grant that license to Wiley, where it was originally published. Wiley cannot simply transfer this ‘license to publish’ to Elsevier, without the explicit permission of the copyright holders (the authors). Did you obtain the permission of all the copyright holders to re-publish this work?

You should not need reminding that this has happened many many times before at Elsevier.

It seems to me that Elsevier is a very careless publisher, consistently riding roughshod over the rights & intents of auhtors, funders and readers across the world.

Alicia Wise

Hi Ross,

Happy to share this additional information. Authors in this title grant publishing rights to the Society which owns the title, and the Society has the right to sub-license these rights to a publisher. They Society has recently switched from Wiley to Elsevier. We are very happy that Clinical Microbiology& Infection has joined our infectious diseases publishing portfolio (www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com).